1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate, in general, to management of data center assets, and particularly to establishing standard operating procedures to automate the administration of these data center assets.
2. Relevant Background
Many commercial applications, including financial management systems, payroll applications, customer relationship management systems, web services, enterprise resource planning systems and commercial database applications such as Oracle, DB2, MySQL and SQL Server all operate on physical servers, interconnected via a network and collectively comprise what is termed a data center. Operating systems, networks, network management systems, storage systems, storage management systems and software applications are hereafter referred to as “data center assets”. Enterprises worldwide spend billions of dollars annually in managing and administering such data centers. Data center administration is the process of establishing applications, servers, and networks, and ensuring their integrity, recoverability, security, availability, reliability, scalability and performance. Information Technology (“IT”) Administrators (which may encompass such roles as “Database Administrators (DBAs) who handle database application specific tasks, Network Administrators who handle network connectivity tasks, Storage Administrators who handle storage subsystem tasks and Systems Administrators who handle general operating system administration and others) collectively manage the data center environment. They identify user requirements, set up physical servers, install operating systems and applications on these servers, periodically upgrade operating system and application software and monitor the overall performance of all data center assets. Because they also may design and implement system security, IT Administrators often plan and coordinate security measures as well. With the volume of sensitive, mission critical data generated being managed by these servers and applications, data integrity, backup systems, and security have become increasingly important aspects of the job of IT Administrators. While certain tools are used to assist in the completion of some of these tasks, the bulk of the work today is done manually.
The average data center environment involves one or more IT Administrators (usually in specific DBA or system administrator roles). Regardless of the role played, an IT Administrator uses specific software tools and scripts to assist with the setup, monitoring and maintenance of the data center assets. The larger the environment, the higher the number of IT Administrators and tools and scripts in use. These tools primarily assist with monitoring a specific asset (e.g., a server, database or application) and/or provide a graphical user interface to assist in performing a given task without the IT Administrator having to remember the underlying computer command syntax. While this is useful, the majority of the work has to be manually determined, performed and managed by the IT Administrator. This is because the work is typically driven by user requests, environmental changes, change control requests, configuration management requests, release management requests and so on—many of which require human intervention to communicate with external users and the various types of IT Administrators such as Systems Administrators, Storage Administrators, Network Administrations and Application Support personnel. Furthermore, IT Administrators are often separated by geography and time zones. As such, their work habits differ resulting in a lack of standardized work procedures and inconsistent results. It is common to find a team of three IT Administrators having three different approaches and/or methods to work on the same task in their given environment. This causes significant differences in quality of work and allows human errors to alter the reliability of the product.
As with most processes involving human interaction, some IT Administrators tend to be better than others. Often these presumably senior IT Administrators are busy with tasks such as low-level and mundane caring and nurturing of the server or database environments and, therefore, do not have sufficient time to engage with business users to better understand where a business is going so as to architect and tune the data center environment accordingly to scale with the business. Many critical proactive tasks such as capacity planning, physical modeling, application/database optimization, operating system/database optimization and other areas of proactive performance management are simply not accomplished due to constraints on the IT Administrator's time.
The tools by which IT Administrators practice their trade vary widely. As indicated earlier, generally these tools can be classified into two broad categories. The first category is that of monitoring and alerting tools. Based on pre-established criteria, these tools monitor the performance of a particular data center asset, and, upon meeting or exceeding a pre-defined threshold, an alert is sent to the administrator. The administrator can then assess the alert and, when necessary, alter the asset either immediately or per a pre-established maintenance window. In the situation in which a data center asset needs modification, the second class of tools is introduced. This second class of tools is known in the art as an ad-hoc task performance tool. Once alerted to a problem, an IT Administrator uses a variety of ad-hoc task performance tools to manipulate the asset. Unfortunately, there is no standard approach as to what modifications should be made or the process by which to make these modifications. The steps taken by the administrator are purely a function of the experience and creativity of that individual. Therefore, the same problem identified by a monitoring tool alerting two separate IT Administrators may result in two completely different and perhaps incompatible solutions creating an even wider data center failure.
IT Administrators, especially Database Administrators, Network Administrators and application-specific experts are some of the most expensive resources in a typical Information Technology organization. Enterprises typically strive to have each administrator adhere to a standard of work based on best practices as defined by the senior-most administrator within his or her area of expertise (e.g., each DBA would adhere to a standard set of best practices as defined by the senior DBA). Yet these best practices are only as good as the tenure of the defining senior-most administrator and the willingness and/or capability of a junior administrator to adhere to these standards. The ability for administrators to understand the state of the data center assets they manage at all times and acknowledge any deviations in performance of those assets remains a challenge, especially for junior administrators. Achieving consistent and reliable data center management remains a challenge for as the value of such administrative resources increases, so too does the mobility of the work force. Enterprises continue to search for a means to standardize and, when possible, automate the work of the entire administrative team thus freeing the members of the team to take on the more proactive, value added tasks.